Hillary Clinton made Trump president, book review

Hillary Clinton has figured out what happened in 2016: Obama. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, discusses.

Hillary Clinton just can’t help herself. As bits and pieces from her losing campaign memoir continue to trickle out like the weak stream from a paid kompromat artist in some tawdry-if-fanciful Russian spy drama, the former secretary of state seems intent on blaming everyone under the sun–including her never-to-be predecessor, Barack Obama. The latest drip-drip release from What Happened? contains an altogether gem-like case of deflection.

Hillary Clinton’s What Happened: A conspiracy theory of the 2016 election

20 September 2017

Hillary Clinton’s What Happened, released September 13, is the former presidential candidate’s first-person account of the 2016 election.

With all the hallmarks of a volume carefully constructed by a team of ghostwriters, Clinton’s book is not so much a political memoir as the Democratic Party’s semi-official narrative of its electoral defeat. Those sections of the book regarding Clinton’s personal life and thoughts are largely fictional, penned with a view to their impact on various constituencies.

Clinton’s theory of the election, drawn from articles in the New York Times and Washington Post, the proclamations of state intelligence agencies, and the statements of high-level Democratic Party functionaries, amounts to a grand conspiracy theory in which the movement of great masses of people is reduced to the actions of individual conspirators out to do in Clinton because she is a powerful woman who loves freedom and democracy.

Clinton’s What Happened is not at all about what actually happened. She and her team of writers cannot provide a genuine political account of why she lost the election.

In Clinton’s view, the election outcome was not the result of social, political and economic developments within society. Rather, it was determined by two conspiracies. The first—FBI Director James Comey’s intervention into the election campaign—has a degree of credibility. The second—Vladimir Putin’s alleged effort to subvert the election—is a fabrication. But neither of these components of Clinton’s theory can explain why 63 million people voted for her opponent.

Clinton’s assessment of her own campaign can be summed up as follows:

The 2016 Democratic presidential campaign had a correct political orientation, advanced correct policies, pursued a correct strategy and was well organized and led.

Hillary Clinton, as an individual and a candidate, made some relatively minor mistakes, including giving paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and using poorly chosen language to describe the rural poor and the working class. But these mistakes could not, by themselves, have led any substantial number of people to vote against her.

Clinton was, in the words of Barack Obama, the “most qualified” candidate. She had, according to the book’s narrative, every right to assume, as she did right up to a few hours before her concession speech, that she would be inaugurated as president on January 20, 2017.

The fact that the “least qualified” candidate won the Electoral College and therefore the presidency was a result of the intervention of outside forces: namely, the unholy alliance of Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange. The election upset was the outcome of the “audacious information warfare waged from the Kremlin,” to which the substance of the book is devoted.

One reviewer has noted approvingly that the book reads like a “spy novel.” Clinton herself points to the irony of writing a political memoir as though it were a murder mystery:

I wasn’t just a former candidate trying to figure out why she lost. I was also a former secretary of state worried about our nation’s national security… The voluminous file of clippings on my desk grew thicker and thicker… At times, I felt like CIA agent Carrie Mathison on the TV show Homeland, desperately trying to get her arms around a sinister conspiracy and appearing more than a little frantic in the process.

This is Clinton’s vision of the election: the American people voted the wrong way, and now it’s her job to “solve the crime.” It is the thinking of a police mind, and a banal one at that.

Clinton’s first chapter argues that America at the end of 2016 was a great place to live. She writes:

There had been seventy-five straight months of job growth under President Obama, and incomes for the bottom 80 percent were finally starting to go up. Twenty million more people had health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the greatest legislative achievement of the outgoing administration. Crime was still at historic lows. Our military remained by far the most powerful in the world.

These “are knowable, verifiable facts,” she writes. But “Trump stood up there in front of the world and said the exact opposite.” He “painted a picture of a bitter, broken country I didn’t recognize.”

According to Clinton, that everything is great in America is shown by the “facts.” If someone says otherwise, he or she is not merely expressing an opinion, but peddling an “alternative fact,” or “fake news”.

Clinton continues, “Listening to Trump, it almost felt like there was no such thing as truth anymore. It still feels that way.”

In this opening chapter, Clinton lays out the argument that the story of the 2016 election is the story of how “fake news” gripped the American population and made it susceptible to Trump’s claims that something was wrong with American society and the American political establishment.

As she puts it, “WikiLeaks… helped accelerate the phenomenon that eventually came to be known as fake news.”

How did WikiLeaks do this? In part by leaking the texts of fawning speeches Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from the very oligarchs and parasites her husband’s policies had helped enrich. Clinton does not contest the accuracy of the transcripts. So it turns out that the content of the “fake news” about which she complains is “true news,” i.e., the truth.

Nevertheless, she bemoans the “wild tales” spread about the “terrible things I must have said behind closed doors and how as president I would be forever in the pocket of the shadowy bankers who had paid my speaking fees.”

Her speeches and the six-figure honorariums she received were, she explains, entirely appropriate.

“My life after leaving politics had turned out to be pretty great,” she writes. “Like many former government officials, I found that organizations and companies wanted me to come talk to them about my experiences and share my thoughts on the world—and they’d pay me a pretty penny to do it. I liked that there was a way for me to earn a very good living without working for any one company or sitting on any boards. It was also a chance to meet interesting people.”

But, she admits, she failed to appreciate that ordinary people, with their limited perspective, might see things otherwise. “I should have realized it would be bad ‘optics’ and stayed away from anything having to do with Wall Street. I didn’t. That’s on me.”

All of Clinton’s supposedly candid admissions of mistakes have the same character. Whether the issue is millions in speaking fees from Wall Street or glib talk about putting coal miners out of work, there was nothing intrinsically wrong about what she did, only her failure to anticipate the response of the ignorant masses.

Regarding the primaries, Clinton writes: “Nothing in my experience in American politics suggested that a Socialist from Vermont could mount a credible campaign for the White House.” But Sanders “tapped into powerful emotional currents in the electorate.”

She adds, “When a Des Moines Register poll in January 2016 found that 43 percent of likely Iowa Democratic caucus goers identified as Socialists, I knew there could be trouble ahead.”

In one of her speeches to Goldman Sachs, Clinton admitted that she was “kind of far removed” from the struggles of ordinary people because of “the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy.”

While she makes no such frank admission in her book, the above quote perfectly sums up the type of middle-class snobbery that pervades it, including a passage where she equates the aspirations of millions of people for a decent job, health care and retirement savings, expressed in their support for Sanders, with a child’s selfish desire to “get a pony.”

The working class

“We always knew that the industrial Midwest was crucial to our success,” Clinton writes. She recognizes that her defeat in those states was not the result of a “surge in Republican turnout.” Rather, “enough voters switched, stayed home, or went for third parties in the final days to cost me the state.”

In the end, this strategy utterly collapsed, mainly because large numbers of working-class minority voters, whose votes she had taken for granted, ignored her appeals to ethnic identity and failed to turn out and vote for her. As pollster Stan Greenberg recently wrote in the American Prospect, “The Democrats don’t have a ‘white working class’ problem… They have a ‘working class problem’… Democrats have lost support with all working class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women and millennials.”

While Clinton’s own empirical account is consistent with Greenberg’s explanation, she refuses to use the word “working class,” referring only to “working class whites,” a term laden with the connotation that its members are in some way racist or homophobic, or members of what Clinton called the “basket of deplorables.”

She writes that “Some on the left, including Bernie Sanders, argue that working class whites have turned away from Democrats because the party became beholden to Wall Street donors and lost touch with its populist roots.” She does not accept this narrative. Rather, the problem is the rural poor who have turned away from the “culture…of hard work” that would lead them to support politicians such as herself.

Clinton writes that among people living in “poor, rural communities,” a “culture of grievance, victimhood and scapegoating has taken root as traditional values of self-reliance and hard work have withered.” She adds, “There’s a tendency toward seeing every problem as someone else’s fault.”

To Clinton’s surprise, millions of working people, including minority workers in key industrial states, responded to such unvarnished class snobbery and contempt by withholding their votes.

Clinton conducted the entire election campaign on the assumption she would be the next president. Her campaign team, she wrote, “felt like a White House-in-waiting.”

When the news dawned on her several hours before the polls closed that she could lose, she felt “shell-shocked.” She writes: “I hadn’t prepared mentally for this at all. There had been no doomsday scenarios playing out in my head in the final days, no imagining what I might say if I lost. I just didn’t think about it. But now it was as real as could be, and I was struggling to get my head around it.”

Following the election, the sections of the press aligned with the Democratic Party sprang into action to declare “fake news” a major factor in the outcome, a refrain that was reflected in a five-fold increase in Internet searches for the term in the week after the vote.

In the week after the vote, Google and Facebook announced measures to combat “fake news.”

The narrative about “fake news” planted by Russian agents having determined the election was subsequently spun out and developed by the New York Times, leading think tanks, intelligence agencies and Democratic politicians such as Clinton herself, culminating in Clinton’s book.

The book is in essence a manifesto for censorship.

Clinton writes: “In 2016 our democracy was assaulted by a foreign adversary determined to mislead our people, enflame our divisions, and throw an election to its preferred candidate.” This attack succeeded because “many Americans had lost faith in the institutions that previous generations relied on for objective information, including government, academia, and the press, leaving them vulnerable to a sophisticated misinformation campaign.”

“The WikiLeaks stories” sent people “down deep internet rabbit holes,” Clinton writes. “In other words, a lot of people were online trying to get to the bottom of these crazy claims and conspiracy theories before casting their votes. Too often, what they found was more misinformation and Russian-directed propaganda.”

The shadowy forces peddling “fake news” targeted those moving to the left:

Interestingly, the Russians made a particular effort to target voters who had supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries, including by planting fake news on pro-Sanders message boards and Facebook groups and amplifying attacks by so-called Bernie Bros.

It is an unintentionally revealing fact that throughout the whole of Clinton’s book, the name “Putin” appears 100 times, nearly five times more than “Sanders,” which appears 22 times.

This is not a psychological tick. When Clinton refers to the social, political and ideological impetus for widespread popular support for a man who claimed to be a socialist, she sees not the will of the electorate, but the actions of foreign infiltrators.

When filmmaker Oliver Stone asked Vladimir Putin if he tried to manipulate the US election, the Russian president replied that the US intelligence bureaucracy plays such an outsized role in American politics that the outcome of elections does not matter very much, making it hardly worth the effort.

The quip by the former KGB leader shows a greater insight into the action of social forces than that shown by Clinton, the presidential candidate of one of the two leading parties of what is billed as the world’s leading democracy.

Every time the United States seeks to intervene in an election overseas, it does so by bolstering some social force. But to what social force did Putin supposedly appeal? Clinton never answers this question, but if she tried to do so truthfully, she would be forced to admit that, by her own account, Russian intervention was aimed at making America’s working people revolt against the country’s financial oligarchy.

But, of course, all of this is a right-wing fantasy. When Clinton speaks about foreign infiltration, she is talking about the growth of antiwar and anticapitalist sentiment among broad sections of the population.

Ultimately, the Democratic Party and the state intelligence apparatus seek to present this opposition as the work of foreign infiltrators in order to provide a rationale for its suppression.

Clinton’s conclusion is that fake news constituted a “torrent of misinformation” that “helped drown out my message and steal my voice… This can all happen again if we don’t stop it.”

She declares, “We need to beat back the assault on truth and reason here at home and rebuild trust in our institutions,” and adds, “Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already begun taking steps—adjusting algorithms, deactivating bot networks, and partnering with fact-checkers—but they must do more.”

“In 1964… I was a Goldwater Girl,” Clinton proudly proclaimed in a 1992 speech, referring to her support for the segregationist, rabidly anticommunist Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. In 1996, she declared, “I feel like my political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with.”

True to her political roots, Clinton’s book is essentially a right-wing tirade. Her narrative expresses the worldview of a highly privileged social layer of which she is a member. To America’s financial oligarchy, all social opposition is the result of a conspiracy stirred up by outside agitators, to be crushed by censorship and other police methods.

Susan Sarandon: ‘I thought Hillary was very dangerous. If she’d won, we’d be at war’: here.

There is a new book out by a diehard Clinton partisan making the case
that the ONLY reason she lost is because of the late October surprise
of the Comey letter, that he was possibly reopening the inquiry into
her emails.

This is stupidity on steroids. To buy the it’s all Comey’s fault
argument you would have to believe that there is no such thing, and
there could never be such a thing, as an October surprise.

Clinton lost because her campaign strategy was to cut it too close,
literally to shine on the critical swing states, a number of which
she never even bothered to visit. Her campaign strategy was to try to
barely squeak by, and so of course something like the Comey letter
was enough to tip the scales in the other direction. When you hang
your campaign on a thread, anything can break it, and you must expect
that it will break. Anything else is campaign manager malpractice.

Clinton’s obligation as a candidate was to unify the Democratic base.
She could not have been a more miserable failure in this. All she
ever offered to half the base was insincere lip service. She
continued to play footsie with the poison pill of the TPP until the
bitter end. In this she did the exact thing that has been the knock
on the Clintons all along, cynical triangulation.

One of her closest long time confidants, Terry McAuliffe, was quoted
saying that she was absolutely still planning on signing the TPP if
she ever had the chance. For Clinton’s own part, she did everything
she could have possibly done to kiss the White House goodbye.

Clinton had the right post convention slogan, “Stronger Together,”
but failed to do the one thing that would have made it real, picking
a real progressive for her VP. It could have been Bernie, which we
advocated for, it could even have been Elizabeth Warren. With either
one she would have walked into the end zone of the White House, and
taken big margins in Congress too.

But she mocked her own slogan with the worst possible corporate Kaine
pick, like VA was somehow the most important swing state. In the year
of the outsider she moved aggressively to the inside.

Worst of all, instead of reaching out to the progressive wing of the
Democratic party in a meaningful way, to embrace them and to include
them, her supporters continued to heap scathing derision on them,
guilt tripping them, savaging them, projecting sexist contempt,
calling them “bros,” even directed at female Bernie supporters, which
continues even to this day.

What a swell way to turn out the vote for Clinton. Even today, those
who say such things have learned nothing.

Just the other day, someone wrote us blaming Clinton’s loss entirely
on Bernie, because he criticized her at all during the campaign. What
was he supposed to run as . . . a Clinton endorser? If Bernie’s
questions, as mild as they were, about why we could not see her Wall
Street speeches, which people basically got to read eventually anyway
because of the Podesta hack, were enough to bring Clinton down in the
general election, there is NO Republican she could have ever beaten.

Bernie NEVER ran a negative ad. What was Clinton’s campaign founded
on, the premise that nobody would ever run a negative ad against her,
and that if anyone did it would kill her chances entirely? This is
the very definition of a weak, and therefore losing, campaign.

How many Republicans said so much, so much worse about Trump during
the campaign, calling him a total con man and a fraud, and properly
so? Were they the excuse that Trump did not win? Oh, that’s right, he
did win.

Most of all, even without the Comey last minute letter, by failing to
mobilize the base the best Clinton could hope for was to barely win
the White House, while still not taking back Congress. The best she
could hope for was an even more vicious lock her up inquisition from
still Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

So which is it? Is it all Bernie’s fault? Is it all Comey’s fault?
And the true answer is that it is all Clinton’s own fault, and nobody
else’s.

How do you spend a billion dollars, more than twice as much as the
other side, and still lose? The Clinton campaign is your hand over
fist money burning model. How do you lose to the most unpopular
presidential candidate in history? And the answer is . . . by being
the second most unpopular candidate in history.

We take our stands on the merits of policy. That’s why we continue to
stand with Bernie . . . on policy. Get your own Bernie Forever cap
and stand with us.